The Afterlives of the Vietnam War bridges religious studies, Asian American cultural studies, and Vietnamese American studies, offering the concept of politics of meaning as a theoretical and methodological intervention for understanding the relationships between religion, culture, power, and agency. Here, meaning-making is a contested, political process that reflects the religious dimension of social and cultural life, and Vietnam War cultural memory is a critical site for understanding contemporary modes of meaning in the U.S. This dissertation reveals the religious structure that dominates national meaning-making in the U.S. as racialized American civil religion, and traces the struggles of minorities, particularly Vietnamese Americans, to assert different meanings as a means of survival. At stake here is both a scholarly intervention in how we understand culture and a political intervention in how we understand the human toll of cultural domination.

The dissertation examines three cultural sites and asks how each makes meaning as they remember and narrate the Vietnam War. I begin with the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, as a centerpiece of a contemporary racialized American civil religious discourse deploying the languages of "apolitics" and "healing" that unevenly includes and excludes racial minorities. I then move from "majority memory" to "minority memory" in two Vietnamese American cultural productions. Ham Tran's film, Journey from the Fall (2007), intervenes in dominant American filmic war memory by centering the refugee nuclear family to define trauma, healing, and Vietnamese peoplehood, while Aimee Phan's story story collection, We Should Never Meet (2004), renarrates the Vietnam War through the marginal figures of mothers and transnational adoptees, to redefine violence and trauma in the context of war, race, and gender. Through these texts, The Afterlives of the Vietnam War outlines the contours of religious, racial, and post-war structures that shape life in the U.S. and the ways Vietnamese Americans draw upon, push against, and exceed those structures, to reveal both the human cost and the human possibilities of that life.